December 12, 2015

Eyeballs! How many eyeballs are seeing your video?

How do you know if the video you just created is getting seen and (probably even more important) getting the results you want? View count? Reach? Engagement?

First you have to know what you want your video to do and who you want to see it. When I was producing videos for General Dynamics, we had to be the sanity check for so many of our internal clients who came down to our “hidden film factory” wanting a video. After a detailed conversation to establish the what and the who, many times the client didn’t actually need a video to get their message to their particular audience. But when a video was produced, we spent a lot of our pre-production time hashing out these details.

This was in a time period before the Internet, so collecting data on the effectiveness of the video (or film) was difficult to track. You had to have very detailed calls to action or other tests to determine retention of the information. Today, it is a different story.

Any video you post on a website today will start to collect data. Lots of data. Maybe too much data if you don’t have a plan.

Things like views, engagement, social, comments, play rate. With all the possible metrics, you have to figure out which data will give you the answers. But as with so many things in life you need to ask the right questions.

As a voice talent, in order to figure out what to charge, I look at things like eyeballs and shelf-life. How the video will be distributed and for how long.

To arrive at a fee, I then combine this usage estimate with the amount of time it will take me to do the job, the kind of finish work needed, any special file format requirements, if a directed session is needed, etc., etc.

Of course all of these are estimates and happen before the video is produced and collecting actual data. But it is important for both the producer and the talent to think about these things during the pre-production phase – or even before – during the bid phase. (See my blog post from earlier this year – “How Much Does It Cost for a Voiceover?”